At Citadel, it is important to us to raise awareness about information security.
Managing cyber risk is an increasing issue for Australian organisations including Defence, Government, Health, Education and Financial Services. Cyber security is no longer a potential risk – the risk is increasingly being realised by more and more companies all over the world.
Cybercriminals can infect ANY USB socket to install malware on your device. Don’t plug your personal or work device(s) into any USB dock you do not have control over unless you have a Juice-Jack Defender or SyncStop.
One of the benefits of operating in a cloud environment is that no installs are needed and therefore exposure to attacks is minimal. Chat to us about Citadel-IX, our secure information management solution.
Attempting to download software onto work computers is very risky. One way to mitigate this risk is to analyse external software installers through VirusTotal before installing anything. VirusTotal mitigates the risk, however isn’t bulletproof, and management of organisational security should be backed up by expert analysis by a qualified security person.
A recent use-case at Citadel involved ‘seemingly’ legitimate software. On further investigation, the Citadel Security Operations team uploaded the installer to VirusTotal which only flagged as being malicious on 2 out of 73 Antivirus engines.
Further investigation returned evidence that code within the software beacons back to a Chinese IP address, which was highly suspicious considering the software was developed in the United States. The software was then installed onto a test machine for further analysis, which showed that the software was attempting to download malicious code onto the test machine.
Cybercriminals use this method to pull down secondary stage malware onto a machine, to execute and potentially take control of a computer or a network with little or no evidence that anything untoward has occurred.
Antivirus products are NOT a silver bullet for detecting malicious activity, a professional defence-in-depth model is essential.
Our expertise is complex secure information management and our purpose is to keep people and information safe.
Within The Department of Defence, we created and continue to manage Australia’s largest information management environment which holds over 500 million secure objects! Delivery is seamless, through authentication, security, workflow automation and digital integration solutions.
We offer a range of secure software solutions that can be tailored for your unique environment.
Sean Lengyel, Senior Information Security Officer at Citadel Group
